Hi every one,  hope you are having a fantastic Saturday today we are looking at another female Austrailian artist and that is Joy St Clair Hester born on the 21st of August 1920 died on the 4th Decenber 1960. Hester was a member of the Angry Penguins who played aa vert important job in the development of Austalian modernism.

Elsternwick was where Hester was born and she went to school from and early age to studied art. from 1933 to 1937 she was at st Michael's Gramma. Hester, after 1937 was excepted into Brighton Technical School to studied Commercial Art at Brighton.

Also in 1937 Hester met Albert Tucker, whom she started to live  with in '38 then in 1941
she married Tucker at East Melbourne. Hester  worked along side with Nolan, Blackman, Boyd, perceval, and Hope. Hester was a great help in establishing the Contemporary Art Society and was the only female painter in the modernist movement.

Hester has a son, Sweeney Reed 1944 -1979 while married to Tucker. In 1947 when her son Sweeny was 3 his mother was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma. Thinking She only had 2 years to live she moves to Sydney so her son can live with Gray Smith. Smith gave her son to The Reed Family John and Sunday to look after him while she was going through the Hodgkins.

It is said the influential, Melbourne-based art patrons, who subsequently adopted him.  It emerged many years later that Tucker was not Sweeney's biological father.  It emerged many years later that Tucker was not Sweeney's biological father'  Billy Hyde, with whom Hester had had a brief affair. Sweeney Reed committed suicide in 1979. The illness impacted heavily on Hester's work and left an indelible mark on it, loaded with emotional content. 

Hester and Gray moved to rural Hurstbridge in 1948 and later lived at Avonsleigh and Upwey in the Dandenong Ranges. She married Gray in 1959. They had two children, Fern and Peregrine. Hester had 3 solo exhibitions but struggled to sell work. She worked mainly in black ink and wash, using quick, spontaneous lines guided by stream of consciousness. She also wrote poetry and used her drawings to illustrate her words.

After a period of Hester suffered a relapse of Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1956 and died on 4 December 1960, aged 40.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Hester